Liquid_Reality

Hi Bill!

First I want to say I believe the world owes you a debt of gratitude for doing the right thing in a system that went off the rails. Without people like you, Thomas, and Edward, we still wouldn't know the true scope of the NSA's constitutional violations. We need intelligence services, but unchecked mass suspicionless surveillance is a cancer to a free society. Public servants with their hearts in the right place can safeguard the people and the constitution when all else has failed. Thank you for being one of the good guys.

Question 1: Warrantless mass surveillance typically drops off the public's radar after a few news cycles, and it's very abstract for most people to consider. Do you think the USA's national consciousness will ever care enough to hold the bad actors legally accountable, and address the core institutional problems?

Question 2: Some of us see commercial profit-based surveillance, such as from Facebook, Google, etc, as a threat to a free and open internet. Do you think we can build systems providing the advantages of those things, while also being robust against totalitarianism as governments increasingly pressure private industry into censorship and "sharing" data gathered during for-profit mass surveillance?

Question 3: Are there lessons you see in how Germany handled the aftermath of the Stasi era for modern day USA and the NSA?

5 years is a long time between launch, and the major events that happen near and soon after JOI. Are you "on call" for a period of time near major mission events? Did you need to brush up on old code, in case of an "oh, shit!" event of some sort where only a software engineer with deep knowledge of the code could save the day? I know that if I go back to code I wrote 5 years ago, it takes me some time to reacquaint myself with the details of it.

Interesting about the team hand off, thanks. Understood about the light delay; I was thinking more like the orbital capture works, but over the next day or two there is Some Kind Of Problem, and no one knows what to do, but then Bat-Engineer swoops in after seeing NASA's Bat-Engineer Signal in the sky, quick git commits are made, an emergency code fix is pushed to the spacecraft, the whole mission is saved, there are ticker tape parades, phone calls from the president, massive cheering crowds in Times Square, million dollar offers to star on reality TV shows, etc.

It could happen. I'm pretty sure.

Anyway, I hope everything goes great with Juno! Very exciting to have more outer solar system orbiters! And having your code out there is certifiably badass.

IMHO this is the most interesting reply from the OP in this thread! Is some sort of similar redundancy used as well for the science data as well as the flight software? I assume there is typically a large amount of data buffered on the craft before it's able to be piped down through DSN.

Can you / are you allowed to say whether the spacecraft is running some well known embedded OS such as Wind River or QNX?